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Diors At Work

Diors At Work

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Publishing apps, SaaS apps http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
According to Techcrunch, the line "We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps" is attributed to Steve Jobs. Obviously the first thing came to my mind was "whatever".
Remember this is the same guy who said people did not know how to hold the phone when the iPhone 4 Antennagate came about. Now the Antennae problem is mysteriously solved in Verizon iPhone. Give us a break!
Anyway I side with Eric Schonfeld at Techcrunch, the whole Apple subscription deal might have been a trial balloon, which blew up on the take off.
The inconsistency of this policy becomes more visible when we read various industry pundits and others go through the policy and pick it apart to see what it really is. It was the disbelief in the beginning, when we read about Readability Apple issue, even though Apple has every right to do what ever they want with their platform, is it wise?
Like Readability's open letter to Apple, now we have Instapaper founder Marco Arment saying;

But Arment is also more reasonable than me in laying out bricks that we hurl at Apple to build a reasonable case;

One issue is that this policy assumes that all apps are made by someone with the ability and authority to collect IAP payments on the service’s behalf, which isn’t the case for third-party clients using a service’s API.
If Twitter charged a subscription fee, or even sold any content whatsoever, no third-party Twitter clients would be permitted on the App Store, effectively preventing that entire market.
But we don’t need to look only at Twitter. There are plenty of paid services, or free services with paid upgrades, that have first- and third-party iOS apps. Some of the many examples:

Evernote’s app offers its premium accounts with IAP, but third party clients can’t. Are third-party Evernote clients now prohibited?

Dropbox’s app doesn’t offer Dropbox’s Pro accounts at all, but the app is indirectly affected by the user’s storage space. Is additional storage space enough to qualify as “content, functionality, or services”? If so, does that put all Dropbox-syncing apps under the (impossible for them) IAP-requiring policy?

There are a lot of first- and third-party apps that access Salesforce, LinkedIn, and 37signals’ services, all of which have paid service tiers. Will all of these be removed from the App Store if they don’t build in IAP?

All Pinboard.in accounts are paid. Does that mean that nobody can make a Pinboard client except Pinboard itself, because nobody else can accept payments on its behalf?

What’s going to be the rule for third-party apps accessing paid services?

Well if I am a developer, if there is even a slightest content, functionality, or services involved, I will go Android Way. Oh Wait, We already did, our (My company) vertical market SaaS App designed for Healthcare industry, only runs on Android. So far it is something like 1500 tablets, but it is 1500 tablets that brings our company revenue and tied to multiple payments from various sections of the Healthcare industry. Even if we want to share 30% (certainly not) it will be close to impossible to calculate!